How To Cultivate 'Stick-With-It-Ness' In Yourself And Others

Rob Asghar
, ContributorI'm sussing out the true laws of physics of leadership.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am, I fight until the last ball. My list of matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats into victories. -Bjorn Borg

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. -Calvin Coolidge

Energy and persistence conquer all things. -Benjamin Franklin

The old man told me that he had a word of wisdom for younger generations. “Finish what you start,” he said. “That’s the key. Most people start all kinds of projects but never get around to finishing any of them. That’s why they don’t make a difference.”

The old man was the legendary mathematician Irving Reed, several years before he passed away in 2012. More than six decades ago, he was the architect of breakthrough West Coast computers that were far nimbler than other machines. And his Reed-Solomon codes dramatically improved many forms of digital communications, from compact discs to image-processing from satellites millions of miles away.

Reed said he was hardly the smartest person at his alma mater, the elite Cal Tech. But he said his persistence more than made up for that.

Yes, it's a cliché to hear an older person suggest that old-fashioned persistence and hard work are the secrets to success. But there’s truth in it anyway that we should all be humble enough to digest.

I wrote yesterday about the rise in “the flake factor,” which may be attributed to the flood of digital communications that Reed ironically helped usher in. Today, let’s talk about how to lower the flake factor, in ourselves and others, and build a greater capacity for the stick-with-it-ness that Reed and others swore by.

Here are some key steps:

1. Tune in to your physical space.

Psychologist Larry Rosen, coauthor of the forthcoming The Distracted Mind (MIT Press, 2016) and author of iDisorder (St. Martin’s, 2012) and other books on technology’s human impact, says it’s essential to keep technology from tuning us out from our physical space. “If people keep asking you something over and over again and you have to ask ‘What?’ often, then you are not paying attention and may be perceived as flaky or undependable," he says. It’s a glaring sin when others do this to us, but seems less glaring when we do it, because, in our own little heads, we feel our own distractions are more important than theirs could be.

So, for God’s sake, don’t constantly keep those earbuds in your ear or constantly stare at your phone, whether while walking through the office halls or the outside world. To others, it’s screaming evidence that you’re hopelessly tuned out. “I am not sure that I would call it flaky,” Rosen tells me, “but young people are so distracted by their technology that it can lead to problems interacting with people who do not feel as obsessed with their devices. This need to constantly check in could certainly be seen as flakiness, but I don’t see it as volitional.”